“August: Osage County” travels from the stage to the screen with much of its theatricality intact. Too much. For all the scenic prairie panoramas and lived-in look of the big, rural Oklahoma house, it still feels like a play — with Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts and pretty much everybody else projecting to the back row.

It’s a sharp-tongued melodrama of cruelty, comical cursing, “big scenes” and shocking revelations. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts kept it all in there and then some in this all-star serving of Oscar bait.

Streep tosses moderation away as the salty, testy matriarch, Violet Weston, a pill-popping cancer patient. “I’m just truth-telling,” she says, laughing off the pained or furious reactions of those who feel her wrath. “Damn fine day to tell the truth.”

And that “damn fine day” is the day of her husband’s funeral. We’ve met the sweetly poetic drinker Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) in the opening scenes. When he disappears and Violet summons her sister (Margo Martindale) and daughters (Roberts, Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis), we know he’s not coming back.

Streep, pale, with chemo-thinned hair not-really-hidden by a wig, staggers and lurches between bemused incoherence and unbottled rage, lashing out at Barb, the only one to really stand up to her. As Barb, Roberts doesn’t let herself look as timeworn and grief-stricken as you’d expect. But she ratchets up the volume to the point where you fear violence.

“Osage County” does offer up one almost-heartbreaking moment. But it’s so icky that you want to wash it out of your mouth — with supermarket merlot — rather than savor it.